A few weeks ago Ms.Edwards told the class that we would be starting a capstone unit. The week that my class started capstone I was unfortunately sick and had the flu but luckily when I got back I was able to catch up. You might be wondering what a capstone is, and thats what im about to explain to you now, a capstone is a project that we do at heathcote towards the end of the year in fifth grade, basically we have to do a presentation about a topic that we get to choose, it’s a fun project but it can also be really challenging sometimes.  We can choose what we want our topic to be and choose and plan out our presentation.  I already have some ideas for my presentation even though we´re not up to that step yet, and even though we just started I can already tell this is going to be a fun project.

I think coming up with a topic is probably going to be the most challenging step of this project. To help us come up with a topic, my teacher made us fill out a document that had a bunch of questions about ourselves. I think it was really helpful because then I could see what I like and what could form a cool topic. I knew that I wanted my capstone topic to be movie making or something related and the topic I ended up choosing was CGI (computer generated imagery) which is the special effects used in movies. I wanted my topic to have to do something with movie making because movie making really interests me and because I’m an actress.  I was originally going to just do movie making overall as my topic but it was too big of a topic so my teacher helped me narrow it down to CGI.

Coming up with my main inquiry question was also challenging and I had to change it a couple times to get the perfect one. Before I narrowed down my topic to CGI I was doing movie making in general as my topic. My first version of my question was ¨ how has movie making evolved overtime?¨ Then after fixing the wording a bit and playing around with it by adding to it I came up with ¨ How has newer technology changed the film industry and how has it helped movie making evolve overtime? ¨  I really liked this question and thought it was perfect until I met with my teacher to get it approved and she helped me narrow my topic down to CGI and change my question to ¨How has Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) revolutionized the film industry?¨ at first i liked the question but I wasn’t really sure if I was completely passionate about it because I really liked my old question, but when I started researching a bit about CGI I found some really cool information and ideas and that made me even more interested in the topic.

At first coming up with sub questions was a bit challenging because at first i thought my topic could just be researched without having to research anything else to figure it out but then I started thinking of the information I wanted to include in my capstone presentation and I started getting some ideas for sub questions like ¨How was CGI invented and used back when they made it?¨ and ¨ What is CGI and how does it work?¨

Overall I’m really excited for this unit because it will be really fun even though it has been a bit challenging. I can’t wait to make my capstone and see my classmates too!